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TRUMP'S RISKY GAMBLE WITH THE NORTH

Nuclear weapons are primarily defensive in nature and
represent the ultimate insurance against foreign invasion. This must be the
backdrop for the future of Trump-Kim meeting for which the expectations seem to
have been hastily heightened and not the much-exaggerated “historic” meeting
between the leaders of the two Koreas. No less “historic” meetings were already
held twice before––in 2000 and 2007––and the 1992 Joint Declaration for the
Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula literally stated that “The South and
the North shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy
or use nuclear weapons.”

We are at the very beginning, not at the end, of a long road
that may lead to nuclear-free peace with North Korea, but quite realistically
may not. Even worse, with the exaggerated expectations now, the Trump
Administration has actually increased the risk of a large-scale conflict.

How we got here?

The North Korean regime’s policy of brinksmanship over the
past few years has led to dangerously heightened tensions with the US, the use
of threatening rhetoric from both sides, and perhaps most importantly, a rare
for these years agreement in the UNSC that sough China and Russia on board, led
to the imposition of severe sanctions that finally worked. It was their effects
on the North Korean economy, and not the brinkmanship policy, that pushed Kim
Jong-un to step over the DMZ on April 27. Now both sides, the United States and
North Korea, seek to cash in from the situation. But what they want may not be
so easily reconcilable.

The US position for negotiations has a non-negotiable precondition for a complete and irreversible denuclearization of the North, termed
back in 2003 termed CVID: “Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible
Denuclearization”. The US is right. The North has “given up” its nuclear
program one too many times before, even blowing up in June 2008 the cooling
tower of the plutonium production reactor at Yongbyon. On April 1, 2013, the
North’s nuclear program, however, was put back on track, a horrible April’s
Fool. Thus, only a CVID can guarantee that North Korea’s nuclear program will never
be revived again.

Such a step could prove, however, fatal for Kim, even with
international guarantees, and that has been the crux of the problem for so
long. The historical records are instructive, and North Koreans pay close
attention to them. Back in the early 1990s, it was perhaps still possible to
embrace a form of peacemaking idealism, naïve as it may have been, to give up
nuclear weapons and other WMDs in exchange for a promise for a bright and
prosperous future. South Africa, Brazil, and Ukraine all did it. Later and under
different circumstances, Iraq was pressured to do it, and more significantly,
Libya was persuaded to follow. It is by no accident that the US National
Security Advisor John Bolton frequently evokes the Libyan case, as recently
outlined again here,
as the path forward for North Korea.

But, it is 2018 and not 1998, and both Saddam Hussein and
Moammar Qaddafi are dead almost certainly because both gave up their deterrent
weapons. Ukraine, too, paid a hefty price for naively trusting the US, the EU,
and Russia to safeguard the inviolability of its borders in exchange of returning
to Russia close to 300 nuclear missiles that were stationed there during the
Cold War by the Soviet Union. In international politics “talk is cheap” and the
only insurance policy Kim can have against the risk his regime to follow in the
steps of Libya or Ukraine, are the nuclear weapons. The North Koreans have
already signaled that a Libyan scenario is unacceptable,
because it will leave the regime exposed, and recently the president Trump was
publically advised
not even to mention Libya with Kim. Which, of course, raises the question why
Bolton mentioned it in a first place.

The short-range missiles, aimed at Seoul, that some believe
it to be sufficient deterrence that can reassure the North Korean regime, are
an option. They are estimated to be able to pepper the area every three-square
meter, enough to cause havoc in the South and in the region. By giving up
completely and irreversibly its nuclear weapons, the North will also lose its
ability to hold Japan, the US bases there and in Guam as collateral. Not to
mention that a possible military revolt––one of the many possible scenarios the
US military has worked on––makes the control over the nuclear button a
necessary secondary insurance.

What are then the options for the North?

North Korea wants a peace treaty and guarantees that the US
will not invade. Probably, Kim Jong-un also wants to bring some prosperity––whatever
that might mean for him––to his people. For that, North Korea needs to sign a
peace treaty with the US, which will be itself a multistep process. First, it
will involve a declaration of an end of the war––a condition that can stand
alone, without a formal peace agreement––and in practice will formally put to
an end the hostilities with the North, but not much more than that. Such
declaration is far from a complete peace agreement. But even that step is under
question.

The more realistic scenario is that the two sides will have
to agree to begin with incremental talks, even if they want to negotiate a
massive “packaged deal” that would lead to a more comprehensive
denuclearization of the Peninsula. None of this is possible during the
Trump-Kim meeting. Furthermore, there are two problems that beset this option.

First, that the all-at-once––what is some call a “comprehensive
denuclearization” approach––asks too much trusting, which causes a
tremendous Prisoner’s Dilemma for the negotiating sides. Furthermore, for the
“comprehensive” approach North Korean’s understanding of what “denuclearization”
means seems elastic. Like CVID, North Korea also asks for nuclear-free
Peninsula, or NWFZ, a policy coined by Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung in the
1980s.

But while policies both propagate as their ultimate aim the
“denuclearization” of the Peninsula they entail diametrically different
outcomes. At the current moment, these two positions seem irreconcilable and
irresolvable.

North Korea has already agreed to stop the nuclear and
intercontinental ballistic missile tests and to close down its nuclear test
site at Punggyeri (which is alleged to have collapsed
recently, albeit it may still be operational). But in
exchange, it has already stated that it wants NWFZ and the removal of the US
nuclear umbrella and their 29-thousand strong US military force from the
Peninsula.

For the US abandoning the Mutual Defense Treaty Agreement with
ROK, however, may be a red line that even the impulsive Trump will not cross.
Not only such an act will leave the US in an inherently inferior position, and not
only it will send all the wrong signals to the other nations with which the US
has defense treaties, such as Japan or the NATO members. Such an option will
also expose ROK at an extremely vulnerable state not to be able to defend
itself against a sudden future change of hearts from either the North, or China.

The “comprehensive” predicament then will require a second
option for building trust and making the prisoner’s dilemma reiterative: an
“incremental” approach, which should in theory help build trust through
step-by-step, tit-for-tat concessions, and continuous negotiations. The problem
is that this approach has already been tried twice over the past two decades,
and failed, admittedly for a host of complex reasons, but not least because of
disagreement on the speed to proceed further.

The second problem is that Trump agreed to meet with Kim
without prior preconditions laid down, or at least preliminary negotiations
being held to determine the scope of the possible options to negotiate on. A valid
question is why he agreed at all?

Trump’s motives for going head-on into this Korean adventure
seem utterly domestic, trying to deliver a tangible foreign policy achievement before
the mid-term elections, and ease the pressure from the continuing investigations
and incessant scandals that rattle his administration since inauguration. It is
obvious that Trump sees himself as an unconventional player who, much like his
dealings with domestic politics or for that matter with the US allies, will be
able to muddy the waters and pull out of it the big fish that no one was able
to do before him.

What happens if or when this “comprehensive” approach fails?

Faced with the impossibility to resolve the North Korean
nuclear paradox, at some point Trump will probably have to accept that there
will be no “comprehensive and irreversible” deal, only an incremental one. He
will inevitably have to act on the outcome of the negotiations, returning the
sanctions and trying to make them even tougher.

It is doubtful, however, whether the new sanctions will have
the same effect as the current ones. China will be now in the position to blame
Trump, and not Kim, for the failure, and may use that as an excuse not to play
its vital role in the new wave, making them a lot less effective. ROK may also
opt out, under the pretext that they want to pursue genuine peace talks with the
North and remain more neutral mediators. The president Moon’s preferred
approach, even if he calls it a third option, is, in essence, incremental, as
also repeatedly outlined
by his adviser for the unification, Moon Chung-in.

As a result, the US position to negotiate further with the
North will be significantly weakened, and Trump’s policy options, drastically narrowed.
Which for a president who is under pressure from domestic politics to perform
and deliver tangible foreign policy success, would mean a necessity to escalate
the confrontation to even higher tension levels.

Last year, I warned here that
Trump’s presidency is faced with a “Gorbachev Moment” and that in his haste
desire to prove himself a maverick he is faced with a risk unwittingly to bring
the entire edifice down, largely because of his lack of understanding of the
complexity of the diplomatic negotiations, and how their success at times hangs
on a hair threat. Rushing to meet with Kim, without first determining the scope
of such negotiations, Trump shows that he is steadily on such path. With his
haste acts, he has already done three major damages to the possibility of a
real success and a breakthrough with the North, if ever existed one.

First, he had validated Kim Jong-un as a major world leader
to reckon with, regardless of his despicable human rights track record. The
American president does not meet with unimportant world leaders, and now Kim is
now just elevated to the elite class of leaders, but also fully legitimized.
The message this sends to all other potential dictators in the world is
unmistakable. Second, Trump has all but officially legitimized North Korea’s
nuclear status. Again, the signal this sends to other rogue states cannot be
more wrong, think of Iran for example. In a way, the timing for all this could
not have been worse for the EU leaders who are desperately trying to save the
JCPOE. And, third Trump has now opened a new phase of the peace negotiations,
which inevitably include ROK, and China, turning the negotiation process into
one that will no longer be either led by or controlled by the United States
alone. This last point has additional serious implications for the future,
which I lay down below.

It seems as though, the current events may not have been
“historical” in any positive meaning of the word, after all. But they are
certainly consequential, hiding dark and gloomy prospects for the future.

A year ago, on the eve of the Brexit vote, many went to bed confident that the referendum was one big showoff event for those who held a deep-rooted, but utterly misplaced, contempt for the political, social, and economic consequences for the UK’s membership in the EU. They expected that at the end of the day sanity would prevail. Their complacency did them in! Then in November, many went to bed in the US, believing that what happened in the UK half a year before was a unique event, Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency was a joke, and he had virtually no chance of prevailing. Complacent again. If voters - and more importantly, those among them complacent enough to believe that democracy would take care of itself without a robust get-out-the-vote effort - knew then what they know now, they certainly would have gone to the polls. But they didn’t. Instead, they bet on pollsters’ predictions. Their forecasts could not have been more wrong. In the Brexit referendum, only 36% of …